For the fourth iteration of “off the wall”, the gallery invited Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams, a participant in Chicago’s inaugural Architecture Biennial in 2015, to create site-specific public artworks on 6 bus benches located in the Wicker Park Bucktown neighborhood.
Trained as an architect, Williams is interested in how combining the disciplines of art and architecture might help make all the parts of a city thrive. She likes to use color, in this instance gold, as a way to illustrate spatial inequity by elevating humble materials and objects that might otherwise go unnoticed. Williams’ transformation of common materials– in this case bricks that the artist acquired from demolition sites on the south side, and shrouds in imitation gold leaf to emphasize ideas about our collective and often unchallenged acceptance of gold as both materially and socially valuable.
